Texas women celebrate freedom knowing we have less

When in the course of human events we find ourselves backsliding into somebody’s fun-house version of progress, when our hard-fought equal station is less equal than the day before, when we’re governed by people who deprive us of rights without our consent, thanks to the political chicanery known as gerrymandering, we must, as the forefathers wrote, submit these truths to a candid world.

Here are the truths, candid world.

Women in 2022 are not paid equally for equal work. We’re charged more for everything from disposable razors to mortgages. In states such as Texas, we are taxed each month for tampons and pads. We are underrepresented in Congress and on Wall Street.

We are more likely to endure rape, domestic violence and workplace harassment. Even if we earn as much or more than our male spouses, we’re often still stuck with the majority of housework.

And now, in roughly half the states in the nation, millions of women have lost control of their own bodies, their own reproductive health care, their own destinies after the Supreme Court overturned the case that ensured the constitutional right to abortion. Today, it’s abortion rights and if you listen to Justice Clarence Thomas, tomorrow it could be birth control and same-sex marriage.

This Independence Day, I’ll be thinking a little harder about what that word really means. Yes, there are a great many freedoms we enjoy in this country along with a standard of living that’s the envy of most nations.

This year, like many others, I’ll travel with my family to my hometown of Seguin for a Fourth of July parade that’s so popular, my brother-in-law started taping off space for our lawn chairs more than a week ago.

As always, the kids will wave American flags, we’ll stand for the veterans and for every fluttering approach of Old Glory. We’ll pay tribute to the world’s oldest democracy and breathe a sigh of relief that it survived another year. For a while there, as we’re learning in the Jan. 6 hearings, it got dicey.

I’ll stand there watching the floats or oohing and ahhing at the fireworks, celebrating the privilege of self-governance and the promises enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — hoping someday soon they’ll be realized equally by all of us, including people of color and Indigenous Americans, immigrants struggling for status and belonging, and those toiling long hours for something less than a living wage.

This year, I’ll add women to that list. Despite our strides and leaps of progress, we were reminded recently by the U.S. Supreme Court that our own privileges in this country are borrowed — contingent on the kindness and enlightened thinking of the men who, two centuries later, mostly still call the shots.

Last week, many of us felt our “equal station” suddenly move beneath our feet. One day we had a right. The next day it was gone. A decision as intimate, physically fraught as childbirth was handed over to a conservative Legislature dominated by men who have never so much as endured monthly menstrual cramps, let alone the life-altering, body-morphing journey of bearing a child.

As a woman, an American

and a Texan, I keep asking a question in my head: How can I be equal when my womb — legally — is subjugated to the whims of a governmental authority?

My personal views on abortion are complex but best described by a variation on a well-worn phrase: safe, legal, rare — and limited. Government clearly has a duty to protect the life of a fetus that is viable, a dotted line that moves with medical progress.

In my own life, I’ve watched those grainy sonogram images early in pregnancies with as much awe as any militant “prolifer.” That awe is mine, though, and my partner’s. So was the choice. It’s not something to be assumed or imposed through legislation or Supreme Court edict, especially not on women whose pregnancies are not intended, not healthy, not viable, or not even the result of a consensual act.

Those immortal words in America’s first founding document — life, liberty, pursuit of happiness — what do they mean now for a Texas woman who has been raped and finds herself legally required to carry a child born of violence or incest? The rarity of those instances does not give any politician cause to disregard them.

Her life? It is forever changed and possibly at risk if she confronts complications or mental illness stemming from her trauma. Her liberty? It is ceded to a being smaller than a lentil at 6 weeks or a grape at 9 weeks — the point by which 80 percent of abortions take place. Her happiness? It’s clearly no one’s pursuit or even consideration.

Anyone wondering whether Texas legislators will approach the post-Roe world with an ounce of benevolence or compassion, or, God help us, enlightened thinking, need only review the arrogance and deceptiveness of their Roe-era schemes:

Texas lawmakers tried everything to limit abortion rights until the Supreme Court handed it and other anti-abortion states a long-awaited victory. They required waiting periods and for pregnant women to submit to sonograms or transvaginal probes. They required doctors to disseminate medically inaccurate information to women before abortions. They diverted money away from experienced family planning providers to crisis pregnancy centers that misspent it or aimed it at talking women out of abortion. They regulated the size of clinic hallways and required unnecessary physician hospital privileges, and in so doing, claimed it was all for the good of women’s health — a lie that an earlier, fairer Supreme Court quickly saw through.

Now, at least, there’s no need for such pretense. No need to pretend that protecting women was ever the point.

The pretense of protecting life, protecting “unborn children” is still on the bumper stickers and campaign platforms — and still dubious if you watch how Texas treats the children who are already born.

Texas has the highest uninsured rate for kids in the nation, with nearly 1 million without health insurance in recent years. Texas has relentlessly fought orders by a federal judge trying to clean up our foster care system, which is rife with reports of abuse, neglect and even death.

Two decades ago I remember interviewing Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who as a very young woman had argued Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court and won, her case establishing federal abortion rights that would endure for half a century.

I remember her warnings that Republicans’ erosion of Roe through legislation and litigation had made it vulnerable and that, in my lifetime, the right to choose could become a casualty of party politics.

I heard her but I don’t know if I believed her. She died in December. Roe succumbed six months later.

Even now, I have a hard time accepting that a nation I love, whose ideals inspire me, whose institutions I revere, could deprive millions of women of bodily autonomy.

Our government has sanctioned cruelty and injustice before — slavery, segregation, torture — but over the long run, it generally seemed to bend, or lurch, or stumble, toward justice. Toward more freedom, not less. Toward more independence, not more oppression.

This free fall backward does not become us. It does not affirm the aspirations of our founders. It does not inspire the future we want for our daughters and granddaughters.

Women across the country know this. They’re protesting, organizing and registering voters who can right this wrong. As a journalist, I will do my part by speaking candid truths in a country whose freedoms still allow me to do so.

This Fourth, from the sidelines of the downtown Seguin parade route, I’ll celebrate how far America has come even as I’m painfully aware of how far she has to go. I’ll watch the elaborate floats, and the stately American flags and the blaring fire trucks, each moving steadily, proudly, forward — and I will conjure up the part of me that still believes that women will, too.